To Death
by Ashley May Selen
Upon exhausting the last bargain for the cheapest cost of raw materials, the capitalist has one last lung to stifle to extract profit — the workers. Workers transcend all other factors of production with the value-producing facet of their labor power. While this labor power is translated to wages, humanity is obscured in setting the workers apart among all other inanimate commodities. The inhumane labor system in the country’s public sector hides behind a cloak of contractualization, pierced through the socioeconomic impacts of precarious work in a global capitalist system.
Capitalists evade the responsibility of providing decent living and working conditions to the workers through regularization and provision of social protection benefits. Norm has it that the “dispensability” of certain types of work is the reason that bars regularization of workers and maintains a precarious type of employment for millions of Filipinos. A similar assertion is found in using the term “unskilled workers” to reduce a certain form of work and justify a low position in economic mobility. In the 2016 elections, the promise to end “ENDO” or the “end-of-contract” scheme catapulted a firebrand candidate into fame and the highest post of the land. Three years into his election to office, he retracted the statement in appeasement of business interests with which his office is closely tied with.
While the government must be at the forefront of demanding accountability from private firms who bypass labor policies on the basis of increasing profit, it leads as the top violator of contractualization with a bulk of employees working under contractual arrangements. In 2017, the Civil Service Commission revealed that 660,000 out of 2.4 million government employees are contractual. This failure spills over into the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) — the top public hospital and COVID-referral center in the Philippines whose health care workers are now pleading for humane working conditions. In a series of lunch-break protests, the All-UP Workers Union-PGH/UP Manila Chapter mobilized their ranks to collectively decry contractualization and understaffing in the hospital.
As with any other government agency, contractual workers in PGH are classified either as Job Orders (JOs) or Contract-of-Service (COS) employees for a limited period of time typically lasting from 6 months to 1 year. In simpler terms, JOs perform piece work aggregated from administrative and technical functions while COS employees perform lump-sum work involving a certain level of expertise. The primary loophole of this type of employment is its renewability at the prerogative of management.
Service and maintenance personnel are the primary supply of manpower agencies to the national hospital. Janitorial and cleaning services are industrially construed as “inessential” work, hence their separation from the official function of a certain institution. Maintenance, however, is integral to PGH’s duty to ensure maximum sanitation in the hospital for the effective treatment of thousands of patients. The essential contribution of such personnel suffice for their work to be included in the core function of the hospital, deserving to merit regularization.
Despite a number of plantilla or regular positions that remain unsigned, PGH continues to hire utility personnel through contractualization. Popularized as ENDO, this scheme employs a worker for less than 6 months — a time after which an employer is compelled to regularize its worker. Here is where the forbidden “5–5–5” technique comes in: after 5 months, the contract will be renewed and renewed for as many times as the employer wishes. If labor policies are taken advantage by firms for decades, how do we now hold them accountable? Who holds the accountability when the government itself has been in too deep of the problem?
Two months after the PGH strike, the utility workers recently decried that the work meant for four personnel has now been handed down to one. Sans actual figures, one could feel the burden pressing down on the workers deprived of just compensation. The scarcity of funds prevail as the reason behind an unaugmented volume of personnel in the hospital amid increasing number of patients. The administration pulls out the “management prerogative” card as a doorstop response whenever confronted with issues. Silence pays no justice to the situation endured by the workers, hence the urgency to join them in their campaign.
Workers are treated as mere pawns in the capitalist game where the lowest bidder wins. In a system where the cheapest labor triumphs, more and more workers are forced to compete against one another for a livelihood that kills them. When healthcare workers are pulled into this game, public health is ceded to the whims of the capitalists.
